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Comment by ur-whale | Hacker News Reader

Taproot, aside from the upgrade itself, is very interesting because it will be a test of Bitcoin's upgrade-ability.

Last effort to improve Bitcoin (Segwit) was basically a giant shitshow.

Let's hope the ecosystem has matured and this one will be a little more orderly.

Yep, even though pretty much everyone agrees taproot is a positive change, the most controversial part so far was on agreeing how to activate it, this activation process is actually pretty conservative and gives enough time/participation. Hopefully, it lands nicely and future improvements will be more smooth as well.

Taproot is far less controversial.

What was controversial about segwit outside of a large commercial interest (Bitmain) losing the ability to leverage a patented algorithm that effectively increased their ASIC productivity? I always thought that was what drove most of the drama and Bitcoin Cash, a place where they could continue to arbitrage that mining boost, to come about.

Well a lot of people were bamboozled by manufactured misinformation there. There has been a lot less of it here-- presumably because there is a lot less incentive to create and propagate it-- and fewer people have been falling for what misinformation exists.

Back then it was so clearly orchestrated propaganda, but it took a lot of newcomers. I'm not looking forward to this cycle's "blocksize" debate. It seems that rolling new coins is the better vector overall for such schemes, for better or worse.

Thank you for continuing the discourse all these years and keeping people informed.

Wasn't my opinion on it, just a casual observation on the difference between the two BIPs.

The monetary incentive for Bitmain was without dispute last time. Such a thing doesn't exist this time.

Taproot will pass without any drama.

I don't think there were people who thought segwit was bad. There were simply people who thought that more was needed to allow more TXses in a block. They were generally in favor of allowing much larger blocks.

The reason segwit got involved was mostly that it was framed as "either we do segwit, or we do bigger blocks"

> I don't think there were people who thought segwit was bad.

Well there were people saying it, how much anyone feel for their false claims is unambiguous.

Rick Falkvinge, for example, put out a series of articles and videos falsely claiming that segwit was patented.

People falsely claimed that segwit removes signatures from the blockchain.

People falsely claimed that segwit would make it impossible to prove ownership of coins.

People falsely claimed that segwit would make bitcoin less secure and that users funds would be stolen.

People falsely claimed that segwit would reduce scalability by using 4MB of data for 2MB of transactions. (other people claimed that they were 10% larger, which is also untrue).

People falsely claimed that segwit would not fix the malleability attacks.

People falsely claimed that segwit would require everyone to upgrade, and that it required "all bitcoin software to be partially rewritten".

People falsely claimed that coins using segwit would be less valuable.

People falsely claimed that segwit didn't solve the quadratic computational cost of signature hashing.

People falsely claimed that segwit was not a softfork.

People claimed segwit was activated in spite of majority opposition (in fact when segwit activated >90% of nodes were running the software and 95% of hashpower).

People claimed that segwit was a "poison pill that would result in a network suicide".

People falsely claimed that segwit was a plot by Bilderberg to give some shadow "jew" coalition control over Bitcoin. (I really had no idea how much anti-semitism was still a thing online until I was getting a bunch of fucked up shit sent to me ... and I'm not even a jew, but the facts didn't stop the people hating on segwit).

I'm actually copying these brain damaged arguments out of published articles, I just don't want to give that retardation traffic. This doesn't even include the more hyperbolic nonsense that got taken offline as it was embarrassingly disproved.

By the time segwit activated bcash already existed-- so the bigger block people had thing and were basically in full on sabotage-bitcoin mode.

I guess some of those arguments could have actually convinced some people, but I believe most of those arguments were made in bad faith. Certainly, I was not aware of any technical downside to implementing segwit. Except maybe the very weak "if avoidable, its better not to do soft-forks"

Most of those arguments were made by people who don't understand what they are talking about, but that doesn't mean fuckery wasn't afoot. Segwit was falsely positioned as an alternative to increasing the block size, and after it went into effect, the pro-segwit people refused to raise the block size like the promised to, claiming some technicality. The result was that fees went astronomical, Steam stop accepting Bitcoin along with many other merchants and bitcoin went from being useful as a currency (a threat to fiat) to being a pure ponzi scheme like wall street had always smeared it as. And who was paying the anti-big block, pro-segwit devs? Oh that's right, private equity backed startups like blockstream.

>the bigger block people had thing and were basically in full on sabotage-bitcoin mode.

Failing to raise the block size and the resulting loss of real economic activity on the chain were what sabotaged BTC, exactly as the "bitcoin should be like gold" people wanted. Twisting that around and blaming the bigger block people for "sabotaging bitcoin" by warning that this would happen is beyond insane.

Segwit was a good change. But it was used by wall street to kill bitcoin and it worked.

Let's not kid ourselves. The segwit/2MB nonsense basically drove all developers away that aren't blockstream. There's no one left in bitcoin core that cares enough to go against blockstream unless it affects their bottom-line i.e. miners.

This upgrade will boil down to "will mining pools bother to upgrade their nodes"?

That is simply untrue. I think there is only one regular contributor to Bitcoin that is affiliated with blockstream, and meanwhile you can't name one contributor who left.

[Perhaps you think you'd name Gavin Andresen? but he had stopped contributing years before blockstream even existed. ... and left the space entirely after an infamous incident where he vocally endorsed a pretty obvious scammer.]

Gavin Andresen and Mike Hearn are the big ones yeah. Sure they left before the 2018 drama but they did leave due to block size disagreements. But that's not here nor there.

The developers that left bitcoin aren't the developers putting commits on the protocol implementation. It's the developers that made tools on top of bitcoin itself. From not so legitimate sites like betting sites to sites and apps like openbazaar, retailers/payments processors, etc. After the 2018 debacle and the ever growing mempool/fee market most developers put bitcoin in legacy mode and started adopting other more frictionless coins like ethereum, bcash, litecoin, etc.

I have a multireddit setup that has the big crypto subreddits inside (r/btc, r/bitcoin, r/bitcoincash, r/ethereum, r/monero), I check it once or twice a week when I'm bored, and I barely hear anything new coming from the bitcoin camp, no development discussion, no cool new service, no adoption talk. It's all HODL memes, value talk and the occasional lightning network update. I don't see development talk among the bitcoin community anymore.

I'll repeat what I said, the developers that cared about bitcoin have left, the only people left that have a saying are people building layer 2 solutions (blockstream mostly) and miners. This upgrade doesn't affect miners, so I doubt they will contest.

> due to block size disagreements

There were no block size disagreements going on when gavin wound down his involvement-- but now you've moved from "blockstream" to block size disagreements.

Regardless of the history, -- bullet dodged there considering what eventually happened.

> Mike Hearn are the big ones yeah

The sum total of hearn's contributions to Bitcoin core were a dozen commits which were mostly one line string changes. To have left he would have had to have started rather than a couple drive-by tweaks.

https://web.archive.org/web/20170809023814if_/http://s12.pos...

> the developers that cared about bitcoin have left

Just repeating it doesn't make it true. Pretty ironic to say you rarely "hear anything new coming from the bitcoin camp, no development discussion" on a thread exactly about such a thing.

I dunno what if it's you or I that inhabit a weird alternative reality, but one of us does because there is constant exciting Bitcoin news... and sure, a lot of memes too, they're often pretty funny even if a bit much. But over time the character of the news will become different as Bitcoin becomes more ubiquitous.

> exciting Bitcoin news

I think you're being disingenuous.

We're talking about the speed and volume of new tech being added to the Bitcoin ecosystem, not just about the fact that one such feature is (trying) to be added.

The reality is: if you compare the speed at which and the amount of new stuff being built in and atop the ethereum ecosystem to the innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the difference is absolutely striking.

And BTW, IIRC, Vitalik walked away from Bitcoin and went on to create ETH for exactly the reasons outlined by the GP: a power grab by a small clique of fanatics that led to stagnation.

> The reality is: if you compare the speed at which and the amount of new stuff being built in and atop the ethereum ecosystem to the innovation in the Bitcoin ecosystem, the difference is absolutely striking.

Here's a list of technical developments related to Bitcoin (including LN) grouped by month and topic as covered by a single publication over the past three years: https://bitcoinops.org/en/topic-dates/

I'd be interested in seeing a similar such list for Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency that shows a similar pace of development.

Edit: removed paragraph based on accidental misattribution.

> Your earlier post seemed to indicate that you only scan "the big crypto subreddits"

Nice and well-formed ad hominem, but before proceeding, I'd suggest re-reading the name of the user that made the claim about crypto sub-reddits.

Okay, so he's mistaken about the author of the comment but how is

> Your earlier post seemed to indicate that you only scan "the big crypto subreddits" for news; may I suggest that maybe popular subreddits aren't the best place for news about research and development.

In any way an ad hominem? Check out his link, it stands on its own.

If you're surprised about that level of activity it might just be that you're not reading the places where that sort of thing is discussed. But there is nothing bad or insulting about that suggestion.

Neither he or you have any idea where I gather information on cryptos.

You are both essentially speculating and accusing me of being ill-informed without providing a shred of evidence.

[EDIT]: And even if you were correct, you're both attacking the messenger and not the message. That pretty much fits my definition of an ad-hominem.

I claim (I might be wrong, please provide counter-evidence) that there is more innovation in the Ethereum ecosystem than in the Bitcoin ecosystem.

As proof, I offer, however misguided these efforts might be (you can't innovate if you don't try "silly" things), sorted by more to less silly:

    - cryptokitties

    - NFTs

    - DeFi

    - scalability via layer 2 solutions

    - scalability via sharding

    - actually working smart contracts instead of a vague promise of their eventual feasibility based on a yet-to-be-deployed piece of infrastructure

    - a concerted effort to move to PoS

    - ongoing work on integrating ZK (zcash, beam, grin, monero)-type transactions.

Many of these things don't seem to have an equivalent in the Bitcoin space (except L2 scaling).

The list provided by the GP (https://bitcoinops.org/en/topic-dates/) IMO very much falls in the "polishing the turd" category: many tiny improvements that very few people care about and show the disconnect between Bitcoin development and what the market wants.

The fact is : ethereum is here, it has real smart contract, it is well on its way to have PoS, and it's slowly gaining market shares over Bitcoin because they move faster.

Don't get me wrong, I'm a big fan of Bitcoin and its ecosystem, but the pace at which innovation occurs in there is probably my number one peeve about it: if Bitcoin doesn't get its act together it will get the rug pulled from under it by Ethereum.

> - cryptokitties

colored coins existed on bitcoin before ethereum was a thing

> NFTs

colored coins existed on bitcoin before ethereum was a thing

> DeFi

meaningless buzzword that vaguely gestures at scripting possibilities, which again, were in bitcoin before ethereum was a thing

> scalability via layer 2 solutions

was on bitcoin before ethereum was a thing

> scalability via sharding

not a thing for at least few years and will be either a spectacular failure or multiple separate chains with atomic swaps between them

> actually working smart contracts instead of a vague promise of their eventual feasibility based on a yet-to-be-deployed piece of infrastructure

smart contracts were a thing on bitcoin before ethereum existed

> a concerted effort to move to PoS

a gigantic failure that undermines security of ethereum and market will not be merciful

> ongoing work on integrating ZK (zcash, beam, grin, monero)-type transactions.

happened on non-ethereum ecosystem

there's really not a lot to be excited about ethereum these days. years and years of promises of global scalable computer, finally an admission that it was all a giant lie and now again years and years of promises of ethereum 2.0 that will not actually for real be global scalable computer, except there's no proposed solutions for any problems because it's easier to part fools from their money with empty promises than with serious discussion about tradeoffs.

> I'd be interested in seeing a similar such list for Ethereum or any other cryptocurrency that shows a similar pace of development.

I can't seem to find one for ethereum, the closest probably would be going through their blog entries and filtering by "research and development". https://blog.ethereum.org/category/research-and-development/

I did find a similar list for bitcoin cash: https://cash.coin.dance/development

Note that both lists are a bit deceitful because they include proposals not yet included/implemented. The bitcoinops list also seems to double entries if you don't sort them alphabetical, so take that into consideration if just comparing pure amount of features.

Also the coin.dance list does not list layer2/sidechain implementations. Stuff like SmartBCH would probably over inflate such a list, it would also be unfair because SmartBCH is based on work the ethereum devs did (EVM/web3).

Both lists seem to start around the same date so I'd say they're comparable.

https://www.weekinethereumnews.com/

> And BTW, IIRC, Vitalik walked away from Bitcoin and went on to create ETH for exactly the reasons outlined by the GP:

You've been fed a marketing pitch that doesn't have a lot to do with reality. The only 'bitcoin development' Vitalik did before creating eth was running an investment scam for developing "quantum miners" -- no joke.

What you were led to believe here is simply false, a convenient excuse for an embarrassingly massive premine.

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